Needle-free Ebola vaccine shows promise in animal tests

Researchers say, this experiment should be advanced into an NIH phase I clinic study.

The trial of the Bavarian Nordic and J&J prime-boost combination initially aims to recruit more than 600 healthy adult volunteers in Britain and France. That’s obviously something scientists are working to change – and one vaccine that’s just finished trials with monkeys shows serious promise. The first dose is meant to stimulate, or “prime”, an initial immune response. Researchers stressed that none of the shots contains any live Ebola virus.

In pre-clinical studies of this vaccine regimen conducted in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health complete protection from death due to Ebola was achieved against the Kikwit variant – which is highly similar to the virus causing the current outbreak in Western Africa.

People interested in volunteering for the clinical study can find out more information at http://www.ebolavaccine.org.uk.

Researchers compared the effects of the aerosol and liquid forms as well, finding that the aerosol appeared to induce a stronger immune response in the respiratory tract than the liquid form.

Prof Andrew Pollard, Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said: ‘The devastating Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone has shown how urgently we need a safe and effective vaccine. Therefore, it was hypothesized that the airway linings could not only play a pivotal role in virus entry, but also potentially provide a pathway for delivering a vaccine.

Alexander Bukreyev, a virologist at the University of Texas and study co-author, says the inhaled vaccine could have advantages over other vaccines, though there is still much work to be done before it can be widely used. Volunteers will therefore be put on different schedules, where the gap between “prime” and “boost” dose will be 28, 56 or 84 days. The vaccines proved to provoke CD8+ and CD4+ T cell responses, especially in the lungs although they were also present in the blood and spleen.

Other authors of this paper include UTMB’s Tania Garron, Ndongala Lubaki, Chad Mire, Karla Fenton, Curtis Klages and Thomas Geisbert as well as Gene Olinger from the United States Army Institute for Infectious Diseases and Peter Collins from the National Institutes of Health.

A report by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) is claiming an aide to ex-President Reagan informed them the United States had invented a progenitor of Ebola virus “for the goal of launching a biological warfare”. Safety trials with a small number of *people are starting.